Help me with Swap Files, Photoshop scratch, ram, and everything else!!!

[Sean Dempsey]

Okay, I want to know if anyone knows the real deal with swap/page files, system resource management, all the PS settings, and everything else about Windows and hardware to make Photoshop run at it's fastest.

Here's my setup:
P4 3.1ghz hyperthreading
2.00 gigs of dual channel 800mhz ram
two serial ATA 80gig hard drives
Asus P4P800 board
WinXP Pro
Photoshop CS...


Here is how I am set up so far:
I have pagefiles on both drives, 512-2000 each. I have my memory usage set to system cache, and my processor scheduling set to programs.

In Photoshop, it is set as:
Scratch 1 is my D drive, scratch 2 is my C drive
Cache settings is at 4
and ram is set to 50% which says 886 megs.


When I am doing something like a watercolor filter, it seems to take forever. My machine should have decent power, but alot of times Photoshop seems to lurch along. So maybe I am using weird settings. Or, when editing a 13x19 inch document at 300dpi, will even a fast machine slow down to crunch it?

Advice and help is appreciated.

[Asylum Steve]

First of all, I should mention that files the size you refer to are sometimes (depending on the filters or tools used) going to take some time to process, no matter how beefy your system is...

I don't see anything noticably out of whack with your ps settings. You may find setting your cache to 8 levels (and working at reduced screen percentages) helps.

Also, unless you like to multi-task with lots of programs running at the same time, I'd bump up the ram percentage to 60% or maybe even a touch more.

My system isn't nearly as powerful as yours, but most image I work with process very quickly. Still, when I work with some of my stock image DVDs, which are 300dpi and large, image-wise, cs slows to a painful crawl. I think it just comes with the teritory...

Okay, I want to know if anyone knows the real deal with swap/page files, system resource management, all the PS settings, and everything else about Windows and hardware to make Photoshop run at it's fastest.

Here's my setup:
P4 3.1ghz hyperthreading
2.00 gigs of dual channel 800mhz ram
two serial ATA 80gig hard drives
Asus P4P800 board
WinXP Pro
Photoshop CS...


Here is how I am set up so far:
I have pagefiles on both drives, 512-2000 each. I have my memory usage set to system cache, and my processor scheduling set to programs.

In Photoshop, it is set as:
Scratch 1 is my D drive, scratch 2 is my C drive
Cache settings is at 4
and ram is set to 50% which says 886 megs.


When I am doing something like a watercolor filter, it seems to take forever. My machine should have decent power, but alot of times Photoshop seems to lurch along. So maybe I am using weird settings. Or, when editing a 13x19 inch document at 300dpi, will even a fast machine slow down to crunch it?

Advice and help is appreciated.

[PerPlunk]

I can't tell you much about windows and how you can make it better, but here is a little background that will be pretty rough, but will give you a general idea. Keep in mind that the following numbers are rough estimates and don't reflect the actual performance of your system very accurately as there are a lot of factors in a modern computer system that can greatly change what really happens. But anyways, this assumes a 13"x19" image taken at 300dpi with 16bits per channel.

Total Pixels = 3900x5700 = 22230000
Image size in Kb(Kilo-bits): (22230000 x 48)/1024 = 1042031.25Kb
Image size in Mb(Mega-bits) = 1042031.25 / 1024 = 1017.608 Mb

Now as a SATA drive can transfer up to 150 Mega-bits/second we have ~6.7seconds to get the data from a hard drive into RAM. The computer bus and RAM speed here should be negligible compared to the mechanical hard disk. Now that that data is in general RAM memory(all 127.2 Mega-bytes), it really depends on the software algorithm used. This is especially where the computer bus design, ram design, and proc design really come into play, but if we ignore those delays, and assume that those 127.2MB are able to be processed by the processor at 3.2GHz, we can come up with some very rough time estimates. If we assume that we have an algorithm that can be described as O(n), we essentially need one CPU cycle per pixel. This is again very general as the algorithm is only generally described by it's major factor of n, and doesn't take into account algorithm optimizations among other things. Also, as most processors on the market are 32bit processors, a pixel that is described in 48bits can not be processed in one cycle. So again, I'll ignore that... Anyways, now with 22230000 data items/pixels, and being able to process 3.2x10^9 items per second, it will take about .0069 seconds. Now that's not very long is it. But assume another algorithm that is O(n^2), our number of processes required is 4.941729x10^14. At this point again at 3.2x10^9, it will take about 154429 seconds, or about 1.78 days.

Now, this is all great and terribly inaccurate as computer bus speed and processor optimizations are completely ignored, but what I am trying to show is that no matter how fast your computer may be, it all comes down to the algorithm used. Obviously computers today are far more powerful then say 10 years ago, the increase is only a couple factors higher, whereas a simple change in the algorithm can easily produce speed increases on a far greater a scale. So really, you can invest a lot of money in the newest fastest consumer computer and the increase in speed may not be nearly as great as you thought. Assuming those generalities above, even a 6.4GHz computer would only have that n^2 algorithm run in half the time, still almost a day of processing.

So basically, what I'm saying is that your hardware is more then capable, and in the end you will just have to deal with that time required for that filter/algorithm... At this point, when algorithms are reduced to be as efficient as possible that large increases in computer hardware pay off. Techniques such as parallel computing can really cut down on the time, but such things are not really at the consumer level. You can get dual processor machines for a reasonable price, but don't always assume that the time will be cut in half as concurrent processing can have varying degrees of overhead.

Regards,
-PerPlunk

[Peter_AUS]

Sean,

Bump your swap file up to 4,096 and increase your ram to 70-80% and you should see a noticeable difference with photoshop running.

With the Scratch disk, make sure it is only using Drive D. Programs exist on drive C: so leave that out of the Scratch disk equation.

If you want things to run a little quicker as well, then partition the drives so they are smaller, like 40 and 40 and that too helps to spead up things. The thing with large hard drives, if they are left large then they take longer and longer to process information off and on them as the drives get fuller. This is partly why companies use SCSI drives for there servers and power users as well.

[Trevor Ash]

I'm not an expert, but I suggest two things to increase the speed of photoshop. One thing that no one has said yet is to get the FASTEST hard drive you can get your hands on. Generaly, these are the 15,000 RPM SCSI drives but the 10K RPM drives have insane read and write speeds too.

1. You'll want to use fast hard drives for your photoshop cache drive.

2. Get the fastest memory sub system you can and the fastest RAM.

It looks like you already have a good amount of RAM.

I find processor speed to be less important than these two items assuming your processor is already "new enough". If you can deal with slowness while opening and saving files then you don't need to worry about a fast hard drive for anything but cache. But if you're openning a lot of large files constantly (like one after another) then you might consider using these fast drives to store your images on as well.

[Franglais]

OK I'm supposed to know this stuff so if I say anything silly then please correct me (before I say it to my clients). My new system can do most of this stuff but I haven't going round to trying it out yet.

One question - when doing the watercolour filter, is the CPU running at 100% (200% with hyperthreading) or is it running at much less and the disks are going mad? If the CPU is running at 200% then there's nothing you can do to make it go faster

You have a variable-size pagefile on each disk. This is not a good idea.

- Firstly the Photoshop work disks should be on a different hard disk from the pagefile. I would say that if you stick with two disks then put the Photoshop work files on the system disk and put the pagefile on the other disk.
- Secondly using a variable size pagefile may allow the pagefile to fragment if the disk starts to fill up. Allocate a single pagefile with a fixed size of 4GB, on your second disk that you have carefully defragmented before doing the operation.

As far as improving your performance goes -

1. Your Asus board probably allows you to do a RAID-0 (or is it RAID-1?) configuration with two Serial-ATA disks mirroring one another. This configuration is significantly faster at reading back information than a single disk. I would reconfigure your two Serial-ATA disks as a single RAID disk and put the system on it.

2. Your Asus board has an IDE controller that you're not even using right now. If the Serial-ATA controller is saturating then offloading things to the IDE controller would improve things. I would add an 80GB 10,000rpm IDE disk and use that as your second (work) disk.

3. I would also add a third IDE disk just for data storage. When you create and delete files you tend to fragment the disk and you need to keep the disks that you actually use when working in Photoshop as clean as possible.

Charles

(Edited to remove the comments about RAM size. I confused bits & bytes).